Shelfology Book Pairing

by John Hersey

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hersey's seminal work of narrative nonfiction which has defined the way we think about nuclear warfare. “One of the great classics of the war" (The New Republic) that tells what happened in Hiroshima during World War II through the memories of the survivors of the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. "The perspective offers from the bomb’s actual victims is the mandatory counterpart to any Oppenheimer viewing." —GQ Magazine “Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and in an unforgettable way, for humanity.” —The New York Times Hiroshima is the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. John Hersey tells what these six -- a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest -- were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. Then he follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day. The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, devoted all its space to this story. The immediate repercussions were vast: newspapers here and abroad reprinted it; during evening half-hours it was read over the network of the American Broadcasting Company; leading editorials were devoted to it in uncounted newspapers. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them -- the variety of ways in which they responded to the past and went on with their lives -- is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy plumbs the depths of human degradation in Child of God, his most brutally violent, shocking work. From the author of Blood Meridian and The Road.1960s, Tennessee. Lester Ballard is a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, dispossessed on his ancestral land. Homeless, indulging in voyeurism, he is accused of rape.When he is released from jail, he begins to haunt the hilly landscape - preying upon its population, unleashing his impulse for sexualised violence.Commonplace humanity becomes grotesque and, as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with empathy and lyricism.'A powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his action' - Sunday TimesPraise for Cormac McCarthy:'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series'n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain